Traditional maps provide a two dimensional birdseye view of roads, streets, and highways. Typically such maps include a limited set of geographic features such as lakes and rivers or manmade features such as the location of a railroad or other landmarks that aid in navigation.
Navigational systems relying upon databases based on such maps may highlight a point-to-point path that permits the user to better locate the desired path within a larger map of paths. Some navigational systems provide the user with a series of instructions regarding the path to be taken.
Although such navigation systems offer numerous benefits, this type of information does not necessarily enable the user to readily relocate to the starting point of the selected path without additional information. In addition, the textual information such as the distance between one point and the next point requires the user to monitor the odometer and perform computations in order to locate the next point. Thus one disadvantage of such navigational systems is that the user may not be able to readily correlate the user's actual position with a position on the selected path.